“Life without commitment is not worth living.”

A test of a people is how it behaves toward the old. It is easy to love children. Even tyrants and dictators make a point of being fond of children.

At all times, who suffers harm done to others, whose greatest passion is compassion, whose greatest strength is love and defiance of despair.

New insight begins when satisfaction comes to an end, when all that has been seen, said, or done looks like a distortion. …

Faith like Job’s cannot be shaken becasue it is the result of having been shaken.

Awe is an intuition for the dignity of all things, a realization that things not only are what they are but also stand, however remotely, for something supreme.

Prayer begins at the edge of emptiness.

The road to the sacred leads through the secular.

Dear Lord, grant me the grace of wonder. Surprise me, amaze me, awe me in every crevice of your universe.

Solitude is a necessary protest to the incursions and the false alarms of society’s hysteria, a period of cure and recovery.

We can do justice to human being only by relating it to the transcendent care for being.

The tragedy of religion is partly due to its isolation from life, as if God could be segregated.

It is dangerous to take human freedom for granted, to regard it as a prerogative rather than as an obligation, as an ultimate fact rather than as an ultimate goal.

We cannot approach the spirit unless we repair the vessels. Reverence for words – an awareness of the wonder of words, of the mystery of words – is an essential prerequisite for prayer.

Sometimes we wish our own heart would speak of that which made it heavy with wonder.

Spiritual life begins to decay when we fail to sense the grandeur of what is eternal in time.

The riches of the soul are stored up in its memory. this is the test of character, not whether a man follows the daily fashion, but whether the past is alive in his present.

Faith is living out and believing what truth is despite what you feel.

I’ve always said that if I could have made a living someway in gospel music,

To see that your life is a story while you’re in the middle of living it may be a help to living it well.

Give thanks for your food and for the joy of living. If you see no reason to give thanks, the fault lies in yourself.

The primary imagination I hold to be the living power and prime agent of all human perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I Am.

There are four questions of value in life, Don Octavio. What is sacred? Of what is the spirit made? What is worth living for and what is worth dying for? The answer to each is the same. Only love.

A higher standard of living also brings about a higher standard of culture and civilization.

We’re not living in a school-of-Paris world, you know, and the things we really see in America are like this. It’s McDonald’s, it’s not Le Corbusier.